by Roman McClay
“The eagle nodded and spoke into his skin, and feathers grew where words once were planted. The eagle lifted off and thus spoke with his soaring; he spoke so far away the words turned to unbroken and lofty sentences for the eyes imprisoned in man; hidden in the forest’s 1,001 heads. It was so far away that man’s woman -in wet ash-ink mixed with blood and scat from the bear and the cloudy milk of man’s seed- wrote on the rocks: I’ve just heard all that need ever be said.”
The Bust knew where these trees bent and held and gave rest to the birds, she’d had this dream in the womb. And now she was dreaming again 92 months from then, and she looked down at her wrist for the time just below the thick glass of her chronometer; analog hands in tritium white and green, numbers in letters and a second hand at full stop .
She awoke.
It was late, almost midnight, and the moon shadows elongated in the dream like a drawn sword, like a bowsprit plunging in the icy sea on Christmas day. She left their bed and she sat down on the concrete floor and prayed to the God, Isaiah, for knowledge first; then wisdom in time. She knew her father was behind her, asleep in bed still; she need not turn to see him, for he saw her. And she saw through his eyes anyway, his anima, a part of the whole that only a woman could not rebel against. For women seek completion while men seek perfection. This was the way of God’s wisdom, she thought. For him she would be perfect, and for her, he would complete the splintering world .
This was -she thought- the genius of woman, to support the thing larger than her, for all was larger and she never needed to compete with what was strong in the world like man did . This was her reprieve from God, as payment for her woe.
Woman had three reprieves: she need not work dangerous jobs, like man; need not defend the tribe in war; like man again, and need not die for woman, like man thrice.
Woman had three woes: she must live for two, but with strength of only one; she must die for child just to be born; and she must not fight even when to fight is just. She must always think of the whole.
This was fair, and God had made it so, but modern woman only looked at the woe and ignored the reprieves. Modern woman only saw her burden not her gifts. The Bust felt grateful to God for all that she had; all that she was and all that she contained to pour out onto the earth and into her father, her love, her self.
Blax loved her and that dog more than he loved himself, and that is no small thing, she thought. Man is built to love woman in a way woman can never match as she is loyal first to their child, 999 of 1,000 times. This must wound man’s pride, but he often remains silent, jumping on that inner grenade so that it not concuss anyone else. Women undermined men’s confidence as if they -man- were not holding up the roof over women’s heads , she mused. Women were fools in ways men were not. And the reverse was true too , she thought.
Why did they do this, how much was there to gain by this self-sabotage? Women ought to embolden and encourage their man, but they do not. They tear down what they ought to protect and restore, women were vandals, churlish teenagers, marring the walls of a great temple to the gods; Islamists dynamiting great works of the soul imbued in the flesh of God’s first man; each man , she felt.
She felt truly sad for man, God’s greatest achievement run into the ground by poor breeding first, democratic breeding that made man corrupt corporeally, weak and unclean; second, in lieu of helping him up, regaining his dignity, woman just pointed and laughed, jealous of all that was man; lastly, she strangled his sons from the jump, feeding them poison so they may not thrive and placing bricks on their heads so that they may not grow, sewing doubt in their strength and masculinity so that they may never competently provide for man’s daughters in the Great War .
Daughters abandoned by first despondent, then incompetent men will -as the mothers knew- lose confidence in man too; and the cycle picks up velocity, torque and churns up storms of all sons and all daughters into the maelstrom of this acrimony and dropping androgens and a rise in aggro females who turn their backs on the whole. The storm was in full retrograde spin, with men flying like broken banyan trees and women standing with saws in their hands; boys flailing about on hexes of pharmacological spells and shame in their heads for daring to grow up to be men; girls drinking through straws that reach outside the hurricane and drop into the sea, salting their pubescent fields so nothing may ever grow . She saw it all as the eagle flew above the eye of the storm and refused to look down below.
Man was God’s only chance to do good, she thought, and woman was ruining this . She was henpecking and browbeating and laying man low, and she was breeding weak sons on purpose, and vitiating them even more once they were born. Woman was in full rebellion, and it was going to get them all killed, and worse, man would do it from submission not pique, from depression, not mania, from weakness not strength, from chaos not tyranny. It was Satan’s obvious plan: to get woman to encourage man to commit suicide and then blame the bloody mess on the man.
A child that has it out for their mother is the second most dangerous thing in the world, she thought. She heard Blax breathe in the night and the light of the moon and she too took a deep breath. She thought of her grandmother and wondered how her voice sounded when she spoke up for her boy. She wondered if the world too was curious for such a sound.
A woman who is bent on her man’s destruction is infinitely worse, she then concluded. For man protects the whole enterprise, he does all the most dangerous and creative work, man lifts mother and child out of the muck; and has for 1 million years. Woman’s ingratitude is shaped liked a dagger laid out with a note that just barely says, in fact whispers: seppuku . God, she dared to think, will allow it to proceed, he cannot intervene, and can only watch as it is all again wiped clean. And maybe there is good reason for it all. Again she prayed. She promised not to mention that even beauty and love hurt the heart.
It made The Bust sad, as great men did walk amongst them, great men with scar tissue and ill-healed wounds and too much muscle for their skeletal framework crushing the bones and tendons and making the body less articulate than it could be. Great men that were rotting on the inside from lack of sunlight and air, great men who desperately wanted a good girl to love and would do anything for her and their child if just given the chance, great men that had instincts for love and protection and encouragement, all bounded and jailed and told to sit down, enjoined to submit to tyrannical women , she thought in the moonlight among grey walls and black books and a man riven with black scars like a map to the stars laying just shallowly-asleep, just one meter away -from her- laboring to breathe nutrients into that bear body at high altitude, addicted to opiates even in sleep.
God , she pleaded, he just needed to be encouraged to be what he was, nothing more, and yet he was hated for it from day fucking one . God, who allows such a thing to a boy, a boy of not even four or five; who allows a boy to be hated by his own family? This is worse than Job, have you learned nothing from that ? she rebuked Him and instantly felt bad; foolish; impertinent.
She apologized and admitted she did not know the larger plan and was certain there was one and she was too small in body and mind and soul to understand God’s infinite designs for man. But , God , she added, you made me with heart, he with heart, so that we may suffer when goodness is held in abeyance and wickedness is elevated; our instincts are to hate this, hate it my Lord. A man without capacity for hatred of evil can do no good among us .
“You gave us hate, you gave us all these things, so that we may know you from the student of revenge,” she said in a whisper into the late, now 0135hrs air. “Discernment is the result from the tools of love and hate both, the tools of opposites just like how the cosmos was itself built. Like man and wife.”
She knew her father, her larger, older, more competent self, was dreaming of God’s rejoinder to her. She could hear the gears grind in the dark.
He was in situ , on his back, paralytic and with only his capacious chest rising like Goethe and his hands in two fists like Zeus. She
turned to look at him and he was like an approached mountain, a buried, extinct beast covered in sliprock and dew, a thing that hid the sun in the dawn and held the last light of the dusk on its high-edged surfaces. He, she thought, was from whence scattered the birds.
She knew he dreamed of her answer, deserved or not. God would speak, she thought, like the eagle with no need to speak; maybe He would give her images of His flight to see, and she would discern it like the sun behind trees bending their trunks so the straight light may reach her round eyes . Eyes, she then thought, that he had called coruscating, that even in the dark of night where no flicker obtained, a super novae -he had said- was busy dying inside her and that he intended to peer into her, for her blinding eyes made him see.
Maybe , she thought. She thought maybe God would allow her -if she were humble and penitent enough- to crown Blax as King of a world that would never hurt her at all. She would see him as man saw himself, and as man saw the gods who -if propitiated to- protected them from the demons and djinns of the desert and the kraken of the seas and made the wolves circle but never encroach.
She would see her man as the force majeure for good that he was; and that his violence was just and his sword was clean of the blood of the innocents but red with it from sinners and fallen angels alike. This was war and her man was king of all wars -all that warred- against her and her sacred tabernacle, her womb where one day soon they’d roll away the stone and retrieve the son of God. One day soon, she thought, they would make love, and it would be real love for she was clean and he was capable of great violence and this was the ground of two elevations where the gods in fact met.
She rose on her little legs, smooth and white and perfect, and clambered softly -as if of no mass at all- onto the foot of their bed and lay herself upon his chest as it rose and fell like the sea, and she fell quickly asleep and dreamt she was on a solid craft, a thing of trophies, laureled with jaw bones of leviathan; bear skulls for keys to the windlass. She dreamed of coyote teeth in the hands of the swart men in the riggings sewing with spider lines white into dark grey sails made of the skins of scarred bulls of the sea, the eye holes small but bright as the stars shone through them like flaming arrows come to land on the oft swept deck.
She dreamed again with a dark captain tilting on the forecastle deck and a red glow of his cigar high -but below the brow- pulsing in rhythm like a slow light guiding the approach. He was her captain, oh my captain , she felt as she dreamed and her lungs filled with 19% oxygen air.
They both dreamt of gods and demons and man in between. The wolves kept perimeter and made not one sound for now.
II. 2031 e.v.
He debated how much to reveal. He shivered as the words spoke inside his head. He balked and felt the inhabitants of heaven wrestle inside him. He arose from bed and glanced at his work, the books stacked up like pyramid, 10 or more and papers in long hand black and margins too; both sides. He walked heavily on the dense concrete floor and recalled his dreams. He dreamt in the same mind as his waking life, he had little left in subconsciousness that he did not already know and acknowledge. He was well aware of how dark a beast he was; he and his shadow shared the same space and time.
He took it for granted, and he knew he should not, that other men were this self-aware. He should have thought back to his youth and remembered how his shadow was hidden from himself, like the man under noon suns often is.
She awoke as his weight uncompressed the bed, she said nothing, just watched him walk down the hall and heard the sound of a bottle opening and draining into a glass and then heard the garage door open -he did it quietly, thoughtfully, thinking her still asleep- and she saw his dark form glide out the northern side of the container.
She snuggled in the covers and felt cold and warm both; she shivered and counted her lucky stars to be alive in this place and time. She had slept next to a king, she felt. An uncrowned king, she thought, and imagined it -his crown- held by some cabal of little men, deep in the earth, under the sea itself, as they snuck around trying to be quiet too. She knew what man ought to be, it took a woman, a little girl, to see what men grown tall -but not wise enough to look upon the ground- could not see.
Men do not see the loss of their kingdom, she mused, they assume it had never been, and let the sands cover, the waves wash away, the dark hide, the sun blind, the din of modernity drown out the sonorous song of their birth right . She looked upon his desk, the bricks of books, the mortar of paper and the trowel of pens heaped up in a paper-ziggurat as the sun beams of morning lay across her legs and drew a white line upon the cement grey wall.
She saw the spaces between pages as each book had been dog-eared so many times, she saw the hand-written notes as she sat up and invigilated the mound, the high ground of his work. She crept toward it like a cat, stalked it with what to her seemed now a purr, her stomach growling and mouth filling up with saliva and want. And right on top was a page written in elegant long hang, with big loops and arrows for crossed Ts and the whole thing a map to what he must have dreamed. She read:
No longer am I going to show kindness to the inhabitants of the world, so saith the lord. But instead I mean to hand over every man to his neighbor, and to his king. They shall devastate the world and I will not deliver them from their hands. Then I began to pasture these sheep bred for slaughter for the sheep dealers. I took two staves: one called Goodwill and the other Union . And so, I began to pasture the sheep… but I began to dislike the sheep and they equally detested me. I then said, “I am going to pasture you no longer; let those that wish to die, die; let those that wish to perish, perish; and let those that are left devour each other’s flesh!” I then took my staff, Goodwill , and broke it in half, to break my covenant that I had made with all the peoples.
Zechariah 11:6-10
Her heart burst into a flame within a conflagration, her whole body was red iron and black basalt and Damascus steel, she was a tiger with a hawk’s third eye, a woman with a man’s DNA; she felt her hands reach for larger things. My God, she thought, this man, this man, this regal man, he was searching out the God of days that gave birth to real men, days long ago, before the democracy of marriage allowed to every man, and the equity of bearing children for each man, before the species had turn to so much dross .
Those who valued the weak and stupid valued nothing, she thought, he or she who leveled the earth, had made it all low and let armies far apart have clean line-of-sight now to attack and be attacked . Lack of value was no recipe for peace, it was invitation to war; it was land without mountains to break the storms or stop the fires, and God had seen that before man had even lost his courage, before woman had hidden it from him. God had offered man all he need to be courageous and noble and right, and he instead chose to be a woman, and let woman fumble as they attempted to be men. Imagine a world where the trees let themselves dissolve to be rocks and the buried megaliths stand up to try and breathe , she thought. Imagine a wolf eating grass and the deer drinking blood from the skull overturned , she said to herself under her breath as the covers no longer gave her any warmth.
She thought of Euripides’ Medea , boasting that she would rather stand three times to face their battle shields in hand than bear one child . What a fool and a dangerous woman, The Bust now thought and ruminated over Euripides warning of when shameful things are fashionable.
God has the wisdom of 1,000 great men multiplied by 1,000 women pregnant with five wise men in each their wombs. God has spoken more times that we deserve , she thought, and Blax has written it down so that we may learn it with our hearts, downstream from our eyes. Wise men must not desire to be seen as wise, she nodded in agreement with this received word, they must act, as God instructs them to act, in accordance with their hearts, hearts written over with the word of God. No longer am I going to show kindness to the inhabitants of the world , she repeated and rubbed the paper with her thumb, the ink still wet and smearing on the page.
She was 11 today, she just remembered her bir
thday, and her body was fecund and eager for something to receive. She wanted his ideas inside of her, she wanted to listen to him all day today, she thought. She wanted them to walk the perimeter of his land and name each plant and tree and each animal they saw evidence of; she wanted to hear him speak the truth in terms she was now ready for. She was 15 metabolically, she felt, and as Tania had assured her would happen. She thought of the big fat bowls of meat and rice and fruit that he killed and cooked and fed to her; her little body consuming 2800 calories each day. She thought of the calcium ions fused in chimera with her internuncial cells; the godstar given to man to accelerate what time was left, to expand the mass of God’s Good in man. “Science plus the wisdom of God ,” she said in a whisper.
She was almost 5 feet tall, and now almost 90 pounds. She was likely going to grow no more than 8 or 9%. She was close to the end of her vegetal growth and then would morph into her flower bloom phase. Today, she thought, she had had open eyes for year and one decade.
She felt a pressure inside her and let go of an inner bark and howl; so she screamed into the void of the early morning and then like an echo she heard his thundering hooves and the shadow of his bulk appear in the hall from the agoge space and kitchen.
“Are you ok?” he said standing at the foot of the bed, vascular and naked except for tight black briefs that seemed a cinch on everything large inside him.
“Yes, Dada,” she said, and smiled with her arms out and up stretched pleading for her morning hug. She needed one each day or things would be upset and overturned and spilled out upon the floor she thought.
He smiled with his black beard face and hidden teeth and picked her up and let her monkey arms and legs wrap around his trunk as she sniffed his neck and beard and said, “vanilla and smoke,” as he laughed and let his heart return to baseline. He had figured it was a spider or something, but his audio cortex via afferent nerves had sent the sound first to the spinal cord -not the neo cortex- and that had made him snap his head and increase heart rate and move before he thought; this all happened axiomatically, without any cognition, and would only shut off the autonomic alarm once he saw her safe.
